Facebook RPG in Art Controversy
By Jonathan Bailey • Feb 5th, 2009 • Category: Articles, DMCA, Legal Issues, News
Update x3: This article has been updated, see the information below. Hammerfall is a well-known role-playing game for Facebook. The application has nearly a quarter of a million monthly users and is rated (currently) at a 4.5. However, the game and its creators, Dennis and Mark Kimbell, have found themselves at the center of a serious controversy as a series of deviantArt artists have come forward saying that their artwork appears in the game without their permission.
The controversy is already making waves on deviantArt following a news post by Melissa Findley, one of the artists who has work appearing in the game. She has posted screen shots showing her artwork and other dA artists within the game, which has caused a great deal of attention to be focused on her post in the dA community.
However, this controversy seems poised to only become increasingly ugly as the situation has become much more heated in the past 24 hours. To make matters worse, it involves another old foe of the dA community, Photobucket.
The Story So Far
Earlier this week, Findley was told by a friend that some of her artwork appeared in the popular Facebook RPG. According to her, she began to research the issue and found that a large amount of the artwork in the game, potentially thousands of images, were from various artists on deviantArt.
Hammerfall, which earns revenue in part by selling “honor points”, uses many thousands of images as part of the game, most of them icons and avatars, most used to represent in-game places, people and things.
She, discovered that the images in the game were hosted in a Photobucket account that was open to the public. She, along with a group of volunteers began to look through the various folders for images they recognized and identified hundreds of images that either definitely belonged to artists they knew or were likely from dA. They also used the image search engine Tineye to help them detect matches they were uncertain of and locate artists that they did not know.
As they continued their work, Findley posted a news article on dA (linked above), which is currently one of the most popular article on the site, to alert other artists and provide them with the needed information to get the works removed. She also published a list on her own blog of the artists that were affected along with links to the works from each artist they found being used.
The list, however, was far from complete and as they continued to work on locating as many artists as possible, the situation became very heated. Several dA members went over to the RPG’s forums and left negative reviews and comments, for which many of them were banned as “abusive”. Likewise, Dennis Kimbell turned the Photobucket account to “private” making it so that Findley and the other artists could not easily go through the images in the gallery, turning the already tedious work into an even greater chore. Furthermore, as they continued, Findley reported that images began to get swapped out, making it hard to keep track of which images belonged to which artists.
The work of identifying and seeking removal of the works involved is continuing but, under the current situation, could take another day or more according to Findley.
Kimbell Responds
Kimbell’s response to the accusations have been fairly limited. He has not made a public posting on the games app page but had responded to the allegations at least two different times.
First, in a discussion thread on the game’s forum, Kimbell said that “All the art we used is either under creative commons license or similar, or we contacted the artists for permission, or was bought off of stock photography sites.”
Second, in a message exchange with myself via Facebook, Kimbell went on to say that he thinks it is likely that one of the stock photo agencies he did business with is the source of the problem but that the site “doesn’t seem to be around anymore”. He has not indicated which agency it might have been.
He also confirmed that he set the account to private and declined to reopen it, saying that “is because we don’t use a lot of the art in the account on the game. Also, our in house artwork for future levels is in there. We got permission more art than we needed for the game.”
Finally, Kimbell also confirmed that he has been swapping out images as he has gotten reports of infringement, though Findley has said that the swapping often replaces one image that is infringing for another from a different dA artist.
Moving Forward
At this time it is difficult to say where this is going. Kimbell has asked for a full list of the allegedly infringing works, a list that, according to Findley is many hundreds of images long. However, a complete list is almost impossible to create according to the dA users. Frustrated by the delays, many are following the steps in the original article and filing DMCA notices with Photobucket to get the images removed that way.
Meanwhile, the negative reviews and comments keep flooding in, the score of the game already dropping 1/10 a point due to a series of one star reviews, and the thread about these issues has over 80 replies as of this writing. It doesn’t seem like this is going to die away any time soon and the actions of Kimbell seem only destined to draw out the conflict.
Personal Thoughts
Whenever I approach these situations my first priority is to work things out as amicably as possible. This is why I approached Kimbell on Facebook.
However, Kimbell’s actions to me are very worrisome. He has repeatedly stated that he wants a list of all the allegedly infringing artwork but has done everything imaginable to thwart any attempt to compile such a list. First he switched the Photobucket account to private, then began to move images around and finally started using another account to host images.
If Kimbell were the victim of bad stock photo agencies and had kept proper records, it would seemingly be trivial to remove the images they bought from those agencies or at least identify and promise to remove them as time permitted. But, even barring that, artists were willing to do the legwork, but now, due to Kimbell’s actions, no matter the intentions, the only way to determine which images are infringing is to play through the entire game.
This has the artists, who were already upset, even more outraged and seems likely to only drag out the dispute and increase its intensity.
Conclusions
Obviously this is a dispute very much in progress and I will be reporting more as I get new information. As it sits right now, it is poised to drag on from some time and the actions taken by the game’s developers seem to be making things worse for everyone.
Hopefully this matter can be resolved quickly, but at this time it looks like it is going to be a drawn-out conflict. Sadly, two of the most likely outcomes involve either Photobucket shutting down the accounts involved or Facebook removing the game. Either way, it is the artists and players that are going to suffer the most.
What could have been a heated, but brief conflict will now be even more heated and longer lasting. One thing I’ve learned about the dA community is that they do not give up quickly nor easily.
Update
Shortly after this article was posted, reports began to come up about images missing in the game. It appears that Kimbell and others at the game are now working to remove the infringing imates. According to a forum poster, a note on the front page says the following:
“Apparently the website we paid good money to get our images from was a fake and did not have permission to sell some of the images, so we are working on getting rights to some of the artwork we use and finding new images. Expect new pictures to be back up hopefully within 24-48 hours.”
This is a rather stunning turn of events and seems to give credence to the idea that the images were purchased from an illegitimate stock photo library. I’ll update this article as new information becomes available.
Update 2 (6:20 PM CT)
There seems to be a great deal of chaos and confusion about what is going on right now. Speaking with Findley and other artists involved, there are reports of images going down, being replaced and being move. The reports seem to be highly conflicted right now.
What I can say with certainty is that Kimbell has set up at least one, possibly more, new PhotoBucket accounts and has moved a lot of the images there. This account was set to private by default. It appears that most of the images that were offline are now back online though. It appears that most of the “shuffling” has been more about getting images that were removed working again and not about replacing any misused works.
Findley and her team are working on it and have made some great headway. I have additional information that I’ve been asked not to report on at this time but I want to make it clear that the latest as of this writing is that the images are not being removed en masse, though some do seem to be disappearing, but rather, that they are being moved to a new account.
I will update as this develops.
Update 3 (02/06/09)
Earlier today, the images in the game began coming down and were being replaced by “Vote for this Image” links. I messaged Kimbell about this and he confirmed that all of the iamges are being removed, saying that “We’re starting over on the image thing and asking for people who play the game to help with their own art.”
In short, Kimbell has removed all of the artwork from the game and is encouraging players to upload and vote for the images that they want to see used. Kimbell also said that they will work to verify ownership of all of the images that they receive and will not accept any images that is not either uploaded by the creator or licensed under an appropriate license.
According to Kimbell, the images in the various Photobucket accounts should be removed sometime in the coming days.
This should put an end to this controversy though, obviously, the artists will be checking closely to ensure everything is followed through on.
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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Excellent report, John. One of my pieces has been taken by Kimbell, I contacted him, but he has not answered back yet. It seems as if he is not willing to work things with the artists.
Thanks for the article, John! It was informative, and it's VERY interesting to hear what Kimbell is claiming. You do a great service here…
I have been watching this event from the sidelines. Seems the minute I got time to look around the art, the account was privatized.
Great report, it really summarized what's going on, how folks are handlings, and actually answered some questions I had!
Glad you liked the report. Let me know if your piece is among the ones that seem to be disappearing as I say this. There seems to be a lot of working coming down…
Once again, I'm glad to hear that you liked the article and thank you for your compliments. I'm optimistic about the way things are going right now…
Happy that I was able to answer some questions. If you've got any further ones, just ask and I'll see what I can find out.
Great report, thank you for exposing this issue to a wider audience.
However, the update you posted is a little positive. Whilst at first it seemed that perhaps Mr Kimball was acting to remove the identified artwork, it's now turning out that what he was REALLY doing was pulling the artwork from the original photobucket account and shifting it to several different (locked) ones and relinking them back into the game. Those images are now re-appearing in the game.
It would seem it was just part of his confusion tactics to try and throw artists off the scent of proving their ownership of works and reporting violations. Sadly, I think you're right, this will drag out and the ones who pay will be the games playing & paying community.
I hadn't heard that. What I've been reading is that users are complaining about broken images in the game. That seems to be a separate (and much more recent) issue than the moving to a different PB account, something that started last night. After this shuffling has had some time, we'll see if the images are still there and then take further action. I'm already working with the people behind the scenes here to monitor this takedown effort and plan for action if it isn't effective.
It seems that some players and staff have come forward with a willingness to help on this issue so I don't think that there is going to be any place for Mr. Kimbell to hide if this is a less-than-serious attempt to remove the work.
I've been following this for the last couple of days. The moving images thing (which is very different than the new PB account) started yesterday. Most telling was that in at least one case an image was replaced with another image from a different artist on DA, and artist that was involved in the original investigation no less. This morning I also saw people complaining about broken images. After clicking some of the infringing links I realized that some of the images had been removed and replaced with take-down notices. At that point I was going woohoo!
However on the ART THEFT thread on Facebook someone posted a link to the new Photobucket account which has one of the originally identified infringing images.
http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu95/hanskim...
This person retrieved the URL from in game apparently. Shortly after this I noticed that all of the images on the original Photobucket account, including most of the ones that were showing take down notices, became marked as moved or deleted.
While I would love this to be just a miss-understanding, the tap-dancing that Dennis Kimbell is doing with the images on Photobucket seems more like someone trying to cover his butt rather than fix a mistake.
There seems to be a lot of chaos about what is going on right now. I've been watching the forums and other discussions and it appears that some images are being moved, some are being replaced and others are coming down. It's hard to tell just what is going on right now. I've put out another message to Kimbell for some kind of clarification but I haven't gotten a reply yet.
I'll update when I learn more. Hopefully this is just part of the “fixing” process but if it isn't it is a dumb move. If artists can shut down one account, they can shut down 20. There will never be reliability in the game until he addresses this…
Thanks for replying Jonathan. It's good to hear that people are helping, and I know that's the case.
Well if it helps to show you what I mean with a practical example, the original photobucket account was registered to Dennis Kimbell, that was privatized and subsequently images started to get moved around and outright disappear as the DMCA reports started to be actioned by PB themselves. So, we (the DA community involved) started thinking, oh good, he's removing images he's got proof of violation for. And then earlier today, the Dennis Kimbell PB account got shut down by PB.
But a little while ago, about 3 hours or so, those images started reappearing with a NEW PB root address… for example this piece;
http://jchanders.deviantart.com/art/In-the-ench... – original artists gallery.
Mellisa Findley this morning reported on her list of work stolen that it had been taken down, and it had… from the Dennis Kimbell PB account.
However about 2 hours ago I found it again in Hammerfall under a NEW account;
http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu95/hanskim... – called Hans Kimbell. The other “missing” pieces are all going back up as well.
Because they are locking the PB accounts now, artists are no longer simply able to look through the archive of 100's of images and flag the ones they own (tedious, but better than nothing), the artists are now stuck actually registering to play the game and search through it to screenshot and copy .img links to build their cases to get their work back.
You know it really sucks that Kimbell cannot simply acknowledge a mistake has happened, and at least allow artists to go through the archive and find work that does not have permission granted and pull it if they want to. I'm sure people would be happy to do this and let him know which images are being removed so he can find replacements. Heck, some of the artists might well want to HELP him with legitimate replacements.
Having been involved in issues like this in the past myself, I am sure none of the artists involved want to see the whole community who enjoy the game suffer, they just want their work protected (as of course you know). It's really a sad thing that this Kimbell guy cannot see that there is a simple and logical way out of this potentially very nasty situation that could end up having a really GOOD benefit for his game.
I'm glad to hear you're cautiously optimistic about how things are going, I'm sure there is lots of action on the real inside of this that I'm not privy too, so good luck, and keep up the good work!
I particularly liked this quote: “Second, in a message exchange with myself via Facebook, Kimbell went on to say that he thinks it is likely that one of the stock photo agencies he did business with is the source of the problem but that the site “doesn’t seem to be around anymore”. He has not indicated which agency it might have been.”
It was a bit of a face palm moment though considering that in the Hammerfall forum earlier today, I said this: “I've seen the 'fake website' excuse so, so many times in cases like this and honestly, I don't think I've I've ever seen anyone who was able to produce a link to the fake site (they always magically disappear!).”
Honestly, I hope that Dennis comes through this as an honest person who got tricked by some nasty stock site. But I don't think that's how this is going to end sadly. I feel his actions have just been far too questionable for someone who truly believes he's in the clear.
But I hope I'm wrong about that.
There's a lot of “facepalm” in this if you ask me. At worst Kimbell will come a way a rampant copyright infringer who built much of his RPG on the backs of hard working artists. At best this will be a case study in how NOT to handle an accusation of content theft.
I've got a message out to Kimbell to ask what he is up to right now and what his plans are in this matter. He has not responded…
I've been talking with Melissa on this one and she's shown me many other examples like the one you illustrated. My cautious optimism has waned a great deal in the time since I posted the first comment, within an hour or so I'm going to do another update on the post with all of the new information I have gleaned. Even though there was some reason to be optimistic, it looks as if Kimbell is either going back on those promises or is choosing to handle them in a very stupid way…
I appreciate that you are trying to be even handed here. Kimbell may indeed be a victim of the “fake” stock site. If so his handling of the situation is just idiotic. He could have addressed this months ago. One of the DA artists that was successful in getting their images removed yesterday with the proper links was aware of the infringement late last November.
http://saimain.deviantart.com/journal/21716547/
While Dennis Kimbell claims that “we're not stupid here” the smart thing would have been to investigate the claim, maintain contact with the artist and to reveal the “fake” stock site. However what has occurred is an ongoing brush off to the artists, suppression of threads, comments and reviews on Facebook that bring up the problem. I witnessed the removal of four posts in the ART THEFT thread.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=369909274...
One posted a link to the DA post. Two commented on that post. One wondered where the post of the initial link went. Apparently Hammerfall wised up a bit and now that thread is alive and kicking. So yes, given the power of human stupidity it's entirely possible that they are just morons thinking that if they ignore something it will just go away.
I actually think most of the above is true with the exception of the “fake” stock site. My guess is the fake stock site they used was one (or more) of the many avatar icon sites out there. They just assumed that everything was public domain. This helps to explain the complete idiocy in replacing one DA artist's work with another DA artist's work. Of course once the firestorm started they had to do something. I think that everything that followed was just a panic reaction since they had ignored the issue for so long. Like a child trying to repair a broken cookie jar before his parents find out.
My problem with accepting the “fixing” process is that earlier attempts to “fix” it just replaced one infringing work with another. The other problem is that with the new account they wised up a bit and made it much harder to actually view the images without going in-game. So to take down the new account, which demonstrably does contain infringing images, will require a lot more work. It also required work on their end to utilize the new image links. in other words they can keep swapping out the cookie jar, or better yet make it very difficult to tell that the jar is broken.
If I had a nickel for everyone who claimed that the “stock agency we bought from did not have permission to sell some of the images” then I'd be a rich man. What's more probable is that (a) they got the images from a Google search or (b) they bought a burned CD of “stock images” off of eBay that someone else stole, burned and sold.
As with any Advertising Agency, Marketing Company, Game Manufacturer or whatever, you (the company) are ultimately responsible to prove WITH DOCUMENTATION that you have the right to use the images you are using. How do I know? I work for a Graphic Design studio and we must document everything with permissions.
If you're buying a CD of “stock images” off eBay then you're either not very bright or you don't really care about someone else's copyright. REAL stock photo companies don't sell for “200 images for $5″ nor does Creative Commons automagically mean that the image is free for any use.
The sad part is, larger companies are trying the same sorts of excuses when it comes to using copyright images, claiming “Creative Commons” or “we bought it from a Graphic Designer.” It doesn't matter where it came from, YOU are using it and therefore YOU must prove you have the right to. Apparently it is easier to seek forgiveness over image copyright than it is to actually purchase the rights legally, because even the large companies know that your average hobby photographer or artist isn't going to take the time to fill out the forms and register every image. Nevermind the fact that the US Copyright Office doesn't really care about you once they've got your money, nor does it cover people from other countries.
Long story short. If you post any image on the Internet, then put a big, honking watermark on it before someone steals it and claims they “bought it from a stock agency.”
Well hopefully he answers and sheds some light on what is going on.
I'd link this to my facebook account, but link is to the wrong article.
I'm having some issues with the widget for social news sites, I am working on it now….
I do too. Though he still has not answered back, which does not indicate good things.
I agree, I've heard that same excuse many times before. The only reason I was optimistic at all was because he mentioned that he had “very detailed records” of where he got the images from. That made me optimistic as that's not the kind of boast people make about images they lifted from some random source. Still, I am yet to see these records and it appears that he has stopped talking with me.
Needless to say, I am not happy and this does not bode welll…
I've updated the sidebar. You should be able to use the “Add This” button to link to Facebook… Thank you for your interest!
I'm replacing my Stephen King bashing SMeyer link with a link to the article. Thankfully I don't think they've taken any of mine.
Thanks for the help and support!
Thanks, posted to my account.
I was hoping to give these guys the benefit of the doubt, that maybe they did pay some bogus company who swiped images (it's not completely out-of-the-realm of possibility). But the actions of the developers afterwards really don't seem to warrant such a consideration. Just even trying to post a review that's neutral but including certain terms gets deemed “abusive” and won't post.
Frankly, I'm wondering if the game also doesn't have a problem with using the name “Kalamar” so frequently. “Kingdoms of Kalamar” is a published RPG by Kenzer and Company and has been since around 1994. I'm not up on my copyright law, though.
Very disappointing, because for a Facebook app it was actually rather well done otherwise. I'd imagine there are quite a few artists out there who would have been willing to work a deal or even donate a couple pieces for a link on an art credits page or something if they had just asked.
Their actions definite do not warrant much benefit of the doubt. As I said in another company, they are either serious copyright infringers or a case study in how not to handle a copyright issue. Either way, they are making some critical mistakes.
As far as the Kalamar thing goes, I don't know enough about RPGs to help much there. Names fall under trademark law and characters under copyright. Easy to see how this can be blurred.
It does look to be an interesting app otherwise, I've been reading some of the help requests and have actually been impressed with the depth of the game. Too bad they had to be so reckless about where they got their images.
Cool – learn something new everyday! Now I know the difference between copyright and trademark violations.
What is amusing is I attempted to write a balanced review – compliment on the game mechanics but ask for clarification about the art shennanigans. And yet that wouldn't go through, but there are those outright accusing the theft and being kind of nasty about it (not that I blame them) that are getting through. So odd.
This is not the first time this happened on a Facebook RPG. Some months ago the same thing happened in the games Elven Blood, Blood Lust, Skies of Blood and City of Blood. As far as I know the games (I'm not on FB) they seem to use a similar template and have the same ignorance towards copyright as Hammerfall. draco-samhain from deviantART tried to collect as much information as possible in her journals: http://draco-samhain.deviantart.com/journal/
Back then one of my artworks was used in Elven Blood without my permission. I contacted them and at least they said they took it down. Not sure if that's true, though. :C
Nice work. I've been following this since your Tweet about it. I find the whole disappearing stock image site excuse to be rather dubious. If he bought them online (compilation CD, download), there's a good chance he used a credit card and the statement would at least give him something to go by in order to find the stock image service. Add that to the rest of the actions (and I think the Wall of complaints is now hidden) and it just looks wrong.
The stock photo argument is a dubious one and it's looking more and more so with every passing hour that I don't hear back from Kimbell and the images remain online. Sadly, it appears to be nothing more than a poorly-designed and unimaginative ruse…
Oops, wrong page. Found the Wall of complaints but I can't seem to edit.
It's kind of worrisome that this isn't the first time that's happened. I'm not shocked but I am worried. Typically programmers who are good at doing things such as building an RPG are not the best in the world at art so, naturally, they seek other sources of art out. It seems some just don't do a very good job finding legitimate sources…
Well, the difference in this case at least. There's obviously a good bit more to it
As far as the review goes, I don't fully understand what is going on. Like you said some very (understandably) heated reviews are going live even now but ones like yours are being blocked. It seems to be on a case by case basis with no real logic behind it, the best I can tell you to do is keep trying…
Thank you for going in there and explaining public domain vs public to them. I was really tempted to post when I read that.
Yes, it seems on the internet – even among more or less serious programmers – the 'copy & paste images for free' mentality is spreading. It's 'perfect' for cheap browser games and such. To me it seems that they hope they just can get away with it cause it's just a tiny jpg they're using.
I wonder how many more of these Facebook RPGs exist…
you need to check you sources.
At this point, Hammerfall has removed almost all of their images and they left this note.
Apparently one of the websites we paid good money to get our images from was a fake and did not have permission to sell some of the images we purchased, so we are unsure which images that we paid for we actually have full rights to. So we are asking the community to upload new images/art that they feel would be good for the various characters in the game and the community can vote on which images they like best.
This can be:
* Your own personal art
* Images under an open license (such as creative commons)
* An image you find on a stock photography site (which we will purchase if it wins)
* Photos that you have taken that fit the game
Images can be any size, but try to keep them 16:9 so everything is uniform.
If an image is chosen and kept on the game, we will give the person who uploaded (and has rights to it) 100 honor points.
they are definitely doing the honorable thing
Thanks for the good summary. However, the article could do with a bit more editing to tell you the truth, there are typos and sloppy sentences enough to make the otherwise credible text look pretty incredible.
Hey, Joshua…I've got some swampland in Florida. Wanna buy it? They're only doing the honorable thing because to continue using the images would've gotten them in legal trouble. Yeah. Honorable.
i just think it's sad that artists for all their high and lofty ideals would show such blatant disrespect towards someone who isn't much more than a software nerd who apparently just isn't as welll socially graced as themselves. Seems to me he's already done all that's been asked. Why knock him for not broadcasting that he's done so? btw, hammerfall's also one the highest ranked myspace apps.
High and lofty? Protecting our work and asking the theft of said work to be addressed is considered arrogant and frivolous? Dennis is hardly the socially-retarded software nerd you imagine he is. He's a business man who's making a goodly amount of money off this application. He allowed the players to upload illegal images when he came up with a 'solution' for the copyright infringement. It took continued research, complaints, and intercession by Facebook and other infringed companies for him to understand there was NO getting around the situation. Has he ever ONCE come forward and apologized to the artists? Nope. So it's no wonder we're slow to pat him on the back for DOING THE RIGHT THING he should've done, from the get-go. Personally, I think it's sad people are so quick to defend a criminal. “Awww…poor guy. Even after he was informed of the 'inadvertent' breach of law, he just didn't have the smarts to figure out how to fix it, except to try to cover his tracks. Poor, poor guy…” Whatever.
I think you perhaps miss understand the issue… the Kimball brothers are businessmen, Hammerfall is just one of their business applications, they make a HELL of a lot of good money running them.
What you're missing here is that the art community didn't find Hammerfall and go “OMG LETS ATTACK HIM!”, the artists who found the original theft some 5 months ago sent him emails asking him to remove their images, then they sent him cease & desist letters, then they tried contacting facebook to take action… and it was only after those MONTHS of trying to deal directly and privately with Dennis that they felt their only options left was to start making as much noise as possible. At that point, Dennis personally and directly started denying the issue and then locking accounts and trying to move images around to keep the artists from reporting THEIR work as stolen. As for Hammerfall being a high ranked app, that doesn't matter whatsoever, especially when not one of the artists who's work was being used was being credited. That means there wasn't even any exposure for the artist. People were actually assuming Dennis had done the artwork himself!!! (And if you don't believe me, go check on the forums, there's many posts that state they thought it was his own work).
It wasn't until some pretty serious legal threats were made that he came up with this flawed image submission scheme, which is still riddled with problems and is STILL going to cause copyright issues in future… and for all the time wasted and frustration and laws broken, Kimball has still to issue an apology for his shocking behavior. He claims to have bought the artwork through a third party website, but still hasn't given any proof of this. This is not a good natured guy with poor social skills, this is a businessman who wanted to get the best benefit for his money making venture as he possibly could without giving any credit or paying for one of the assets that was making his venture a success.
And if you don't think the artwork was that much of an asset for him, you should see the complaint threads on his discussion boards about the lack of artwork and the quality of what's being uploaded now.
I think you perhaps miss understand the issue… the Kimball brothers are businessmen, Hammerfall is just one of their business applications, they make a HELL of a lot of good money running them.
What you're missing here is that the art community didn't find Hammerfall and go “OMG LETS ATTACK HIM!”, the artists who found the original theft some 5 months ago sent him emails asking him to remove their images, then they sent him cease & desist letters, then they tried contacting facebook to take action… and it was only after those MONTHS of trying to deal directly and privately with Dennis that they felt their only options left was to start making as much noise as possible. At that point, Dennis personally and directly started denying the issue and then locking accounts and trying to move images around to keep the artists from reporting THEIR work as stolen. As for Hammerfall being a high ranked app, that doesn't matter whatsoever, especially when not one of the artists who's work was being used was being credited. That means there wasn't even any exposure for the artist. People were actually assuming Dennis had done the artwork himself!!! (And if you don't believe me, go check on the forums, there's many posts that state they thought it was his own work).
It wasn't until some pretty serious legal threats were made that he came up with this flawed image submission scheme, which is still riddled with problems and is STILL going to cause copyright issues in future… and for all the time wasted and frustration and laws broken, Kimball has still to issue an apology for his shocking behavior. He claims to have bought the artwork through a third party website, but still hasn't given any proof of this. This is not a good natured guy with poor social skills, this is a businessman who wanted to get the best benefit for his money making venture as he possibly could without giving any credit or paying for one of the assets that was making his venture a success.
And if you don't think the artwork was that much of an asset for him, you should see the complaint threads on his discussion boards about the lack of artwork and the quality of what's being uploaded now.
I think you perhaps miss understand the issue… the Kimball brothers are businessmen, Hammerfall is just one of their business applications, they make a HELL of a lot of good money running them.
What you're missing here is that the art community didn't find Hammerfall and go “OMG LETS ATTACK HIM!”, the artists who found the original theft some 5 months ago sent him emails asking him to remove their images, then they sent him cease & desist letters, then they tried contacting facebook to take action… and it was only after those MONTHS of trying to deal directly and privately with Dennis that they felt their only options left was to start making as much noise as possible. At that point, Dennis personally and directly started denying the issue and then locking accounts and trying to move images around to keep the artists from reporting THEIR work as stolen. As for Hammerfall being a high ranked app, that doesn't matter whatsoever, especially when not one of the artists who's work was being used was being credited. That means there wasn't even any exposure for the artist. People were actually assuming Dennis had done the artwork himself!!! (And if you don't believe me, go check on the forums, there's many posts that state they thought it was his own work).
It wasn't until some pretty serious legal threats were made that he came up with this flawed image submission scheme, which is still riddled with problems and is STILL going to cause copyright issues in future… and for all the time wasted and frustration and laws broken, Kimball has still to issue an apology for his shocking behavior. He claims to have bought the artwork through a third party website, but still hasn't given any proof of this. This is not a good natured guy with poor social skills, this is a businessman who wanted to get the best benefit for his money making venture as he possibly could without giving any credit or paying for one of the assets that was making his venture a success.
And if you don't think the artwork was that much of an asset for him, you should see the complaint threads on his discussion boards about the lack of artwork and the quality of what's being uploaded now.
This is an interesting read. Would love to read a follow-up piece. How did this all play out? I’m not on Facebook and have no clue what the game is all about. I’m curious, however, to know if the people who owned the artwork were ever compensated for the use and whether the game survives today on Facebook.
The game survives on Facebook today. What ended up happening, according to the game, is that they were burned when they bought a stock image library and they removed pretty much all of the images in the game and then turned to the game’s players to crowd-source proper licensing for new images. Last I checked, they were still in the process as there were literally hundreds of images to replace.
That is about all I know on this one…
And now there is within the last 24 hours another claim of stolen artwork, with rather evident proof being provided. View the forum post here: (may need to copy & paste as one link)
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=46755028429&topic=16258&start=0&hash=bddb7d7b6423df240c82aaf0c951060d
I’ve been following this case closely and will be posting at least a short update on it on my site later today. Thanks for the link!